


fur and fangs

by mistyheartrbs



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: EFA Fic Challenge 2018, F/F, Werewolf Nicole Haught, love that that's a tag! love it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-03 23:56:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14580462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mistyheartrbs/pseuds/mistyheartrbs
Summary: It's always a revenant.Or, the one where Nicole is a werewolf and that's not the easiest thing to adjust to.





	fur and fangs

**Author's Note:**

> i'd already started writing this when the earper podcast contest thing started, so i figured why not enter it? hence the rain motif. 
> 
> special thanks to my good friend @splattery on twitter for introducing me to the wide range of possibilities offered by werewolf aus

It starts, Nicole supposes, with a revenant, because it always does. It's a scene she's been a part of a couple of times before, and the guy's staggering towards the three of them like he's king of the world. 

_Eeny, meeny, miney, moe,"_ he hisses, standing about six feet tall and wearing a ridiculous amount of leather. It sounds like his voice is echoing, even though that makes no sense considering where they are. _"Which one'll it be, hmm?"_ Nicole instinctively puts out an arm in between Waverly and the revenant, and Wynonna gets Peacemaker ready. 

"Take a step closer to either of them and it's a one-way ticket to Hell, jackass," she growls. The revenant doesn't seem phased by this, and his head swivels around, and an instant later Nicole feels an awful, searing pain through her arm, and there's a single gunshot and _so much blood_ that she doesn't recognize it as hers and Waverly is sobbing, telling her to hold on, hold on, _hold on._

***

Nicole wakes up and her first thought is _I'm not dead._

Her second is that Waverly is very good with her fingers. Her arm's wrapped up in so many bandages, held together so precisely, they might as well have been done by a professional surgeon. Waverly stops when she sees Nicole looking up at her. 

"You're awake!" It's the tone in her voice that tells Nicole she's either been asleep for a very long time or a very short time. Her face softens and she leans down, slowly, to cup Nicole's face in her hands. "I was worried, you know. You don't have a very good track record with revenants and injuries." 

"Believe me, I'm aware," Nicole laughs. She looks at her arm again - there's still some blood seeping through the beige fabric, but she can't feel it much anymore. It's mostly just a dull ache, now. "How long was I out?" 

"Three hours." Waverly looks at the clock mounted on the wall. "And seven minutes." 

"Huh." 

"Are you feeling okay?" 

"I think so," Nicole murmurs, because that's the best thing she can say in this situation. It's weird - she doesn't feel groggy or anything - in fact, she's more alert than usual. More than anything, she's grossed out by the thought of the revenant's teeth sinking into her arm. She wants to take a shower. 

"I'm glad." Waverly pauses, then looks down at Nicole's arm. "I'm gonna go find some more bandages and tell Wynonna you're feeling better. Yell if you need anything, 'kay?" 

"I will." She watches as Waverly leaves, twitches a bit. Waverly's room is a place she's very familiar with, familiar enough for her to know which spots on the bed are the coziest and what time the sun aligns in the window just enough to cast a soft light on Waverly's face, making her look like even more of an angel than usual. Still, Nicole can't help but wonder why she'd be brought here, knocked out and coated in her own blood. She'd have to be carried up the stairs, settled into the bed. The couch downstairs would've been the better choice. Nicole's still musing over this when Waverly comes back up with an armful of fresh bandages and Wynonna trailing behind her. 

"Hey, Haught," Wynonna greets her, flicking a half-wave in her direction. Nicole waves back. "Glad to see you're not dead." 

"Nope, still alive." 

"You're sure you feel okay?" Waverly's undoing the bloody clumps of fabric that used to be bandages and dropping them unceremoniously to the floor, focused as anything. 

"I'm fine." Nicole wiggles her arm a bit, just to make sure it still works and that it's still _there,_ that it's not just a figment of her imagination or something like that. Nothing in Purgatory surprised her anymore. 

"I'm surprised," Wynonna quips from the doorframe. "Thought you'd be out for at least a day." 

"I guess it wasn't that bad." Logically, she knows that it really _should_ be that bad, that some demon had taken out a chunk of her arm and all that remained of it was the feeling you get after knocking your knee on the hard part of a couch, but Wynonna and Waverly are making a bigger deal of it than they should. It's fear, she thinks, probably. In all honesty she's a little afraid, too - afraid that her arm will all of a sudden explode into some awful, writhing monster with a mind of its own, or that she's actually died and this is some version of purgatory with a lowercase _p._

"Done!" Waverly steps back and admires her handiwork. The bleeding's mostly stopped, now. "Wynonna?" 

"Right, you've gotta do . . . stuff. Don't be too loud about it, alright? Waves, Nicole just got half her elbow bitten off. Be gentle with her. Nicole, that's my sister." Wynonna saunters downstairs with another wave. Nicole looks at Waverly, studies her, feels her heart keep on beating in her chest. 

"I was really worried, you know," Waverly whispers, walking around the bed to hold Nicole's good hand - the one that's not poking out from behind a heap of bandages. "I kept worrying that it'd be like last time but we wouldn't fix it in time and y-you would . . . you would . . ." She curls up at the edge of the bed, looking very small. Nicole would hug her if she was in a position to stand up. 

"Hey, you know I wouldn't go down without a fight, yeah?" 

"I couldn't expect anything else." Waverly stands up and kisses Nicole's forehead. "Really, though. You should get some rest." She pauses, sways back and forth a bit. "I'll be right here when you wake up." Waverly flicks off the light switch, hurrying as if Nicole might disappear if she's too slow, and crawls carefully into the bed. She falls asleep few minutes later, and Nicole tries to do the same, but all she can do is stare up at the ceiling. 

***

It's a few days later and Nicole's wound is healing nicely. Waverly sticks close to her, fear still eating at the back of her mind. She'd be lying if she said it still didn't worry her, even if Nicole is up and walking around like nothing's happened at all. It's all too easy to imagine her in that hospital bed, death whispering its sweet song in her ear. 

"So, we've definitely got this guy locked down?" Wynonna asks for the third time that hour, Peacemaker swinging around her pointer finger. Waverly nods wordlessly. 

"He'll be out there tonight, on the field right by the woods." 

"What is it with revenants and open fields, anyway? I mean, I guess it makes 'em more discreet or whatever, but 'still.'" Wynonna shrugs as Nicole paces, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, around the living room, as she's been doing all day. "And what's with 'you?'"

"I don't know," Nicole mutters, which doesn't help to quell Waverly's fears at all. "I don't feel great." Waverly instinctively looks at her arm, which is perfectly fine save for the stitches still visible. 

"Maybe you should, um, maybe you should stay here and work on some case files or something," she says, stumbling over her words, trying to get them all out in one breath. "We can take care of this one." 

"It's okay, I'll-" Wynonna puts a hand on Nicole's shoulder and plants her firmly on the couch.

"House arrest, Haught. I'm calling it now. Waverly wasn't even expecting you to wake up for days, you're not gonna drag us down by not being there." 

"You thought I wouldn't wake up?" 

"Uh . . ." Waverly trails off, breathing in and breathing out, while Wynonna looks away guiltily. She tries not to think of those three hours, carrying Nicole's body upstairs and refusing to dump her onto the couch because that felt _wrong,_ somehow, and who knew how long she'd be out for anyway? They'd stopped the bleeding, but this was a revenant. There might've been poison in his teeth. There could've been anything. 

"Waves?" Nicole's voice, sounding like windchimes, snaps Waverly out of her thoughts. "It's okay. I'm here." 

"You're here," Waverly repeats, steadying herself on Nicole's good arm. "Okay. You're here." 

***

It's not supposed to go like this, but then again it never is. Waverly's trembling, trying not to show any fear on her face, while the revenant holds a rusted knife to her throat. Wynonna keeps her grip on Peacemaker as firm as she can. It's too dark to see much this late at night, even with the full moon hanging up above, even with the gleaming white snow. 

"Take a step closer and she gets it," the demon sneers, waving the knife around. Waverly hopes it's an empty threat. She wonders, in an idle sort of way, what Nicole's going to say, if she'll blame herself for not being there even if there wasn't anything she could've done, how she'll react seeing Wynonna carry her lifeless body. 

_I don't want to die,_ Waverly thinks, the cold metal still pressed against her neck. She looks at Wynonna one more time and squeezes her eyes shut. Maybe it'll hurt less if she can't see it happen. Maybe she'll be able to slip out in time. There are a lot of _maybes,_ but a lot of them end in death.

She has to open her eyes when something howls, knocks the revenant aside, grabs her by the hood of her coat and all but throws her to the ground. A massive, reddish wolf - it must be eight feet long - is standing over her, hackles raised. Distantly, Waverly hears Wynonna's signature drawl, the final pitiful screams of the revenant as he sinks into the ground. She's more preoccupied with the wolf, and the fact that she's not dead. 

"Waverly?" Wynonna rushes over, tucking Peacemaker away. She sounds like she's underwater. "Waverly, are you okay?" The sun rising is the first thing Waverly notices. The second thing is that the wolf is gone, and Nicole is lying facedown in the snow in its place. 

***

"It's a fluke, right? It has to be a fluke." It's an hour or so later, and Waverly's probably worn down the floorboards with all her pacing. It's started to rain outside, and the pattering against the homestead makes for some calming background noise against the decidedly _not_ calm scene. Nicole sits on a couch, bundled up in one of Wynonna's old coats. 

"How can _turning into a giant-ass wolf_ be a _fluke?"_ Wynonna throws her hands up in the air, exasperated. "Have you been keeping this a secret the whole time, Nicole? Pretending to be a human to get closer to us or something?" She turns her flinty gaze onto Nicole, who keeps prodding at one of her teeth with a finger. 

(Waverly will find out, later, that this is because the fangs seem to be a permanent addition) 

"No." It's the first word she's said since tackling Waverly's attacker to the ground in the form of a beast from legend. "I swear, Wynonna, I don't know what this is. One minute I was sitting here, and then I felt this . . . this _pull,_ and then I was in that field and I wasn't a person and . . ." She trails off. It all feels hazy, like something that happened in a dream. "It must've been that guy who bit me." 

"What, lycanthropy's another thing we have to deal with now? _Great."_ Wynonna stalks off, giving Nicole one more warning look before disappearing upstairs. It hurts more than she'll say - Wynonna is a friend, and a good one at that. The rain keeps pounding, incessant. 

"She just gets like that sometimes," Waverly says, settling down on the couch and leaning up against Nicole. Her weight is a comforting one, warm and familiar. "She'll get over it." 

"And what about you?" Nicole looks right into Waverly's eyes, searching her expression for fear or apprehension. She thinks there must be a thunderstorm on the way, for how loud it is outside. 

"I think my girlfriend is a pretty cool werewolf." 

***

Nicole basically lives at the homestead anyway, so her moving in is just a formality. Two U-Haul trucks, an indignant cat, and some snide commentary from Wynonna later, she's already settled. Calamity Jane winds around her legs during the whole ordeal, and for that she's grateful. 

"Glad to know I'm still your mom," she coos, picking the cat up and kissing her on the forehead. 

"Did you think you wouldn't be?" Waverly asks from the bed, springing up and down on it a little. It's old, hardly made to fit one adult woman - let alone two - but it's fine for the time being. 

(It's less fine the following night, when Waverly wakes up to an oversized dozing puppy hanging off the edge of it, but it's fine for the time being) 

Nicole shrugs. 

"I mean, you always read about dogs and cats hating each other, and I guess I'm . . . part dog, now? Which is still weird." She looks at her hand, half-expecting it to turn into a paw. "Nicole Haught, creature of the night. Who would've known?" 

"Not me." Waverly pulls her legs close to her chest. "Is everything okay? I know it's a lot." She frowns. "I guess I was pretty lucky. We - me and Wynonna and- you know - we've known about this stuff pretty much since we were born. You got dragged into it." 

"I wouldn't say _dragged."_ Nicole sits beside her, leans on her shoulder. "Besides, if it wasn't for this town, I wouldn't have met you." 

"I guess you're right." Waverly cups Nicole's face in her hands like she's the whole world and kisses her hard, and the room seems to spin away. 

***

One of the things Waverly knows about Nicole the human is that she snores. One of the things she learns in time about Nicole the werewolf is that she snores _loudly._ It's not an uncommon experience for her to wake up with a furry face next to her ear, legs twitching like she's chasing something in her sleep. 

(Wynonna walks in on this, once, and she never lets Nicole live it down)

In return, though, Waverly sometimes finds herself napping in the afternoon on top of Nicole's back, cozier than anything, and she feels more peaceful than she has in a while. 

"You're okay with this, right?" Waverly asks on one such afternoon, several weeks after what everyone's agreed to call The Incident, running her fingers through Nicole's hair. It's grown shaggier, though whether that has anything to do with the lycanthropy is anyone's guess. Nicole looks up at the ceiling - cracked at the edges, with a big light in the center - and she closes her eyes. 

"It's easier to handle now," she says. "It doesn't feel like I'm dreaming anymore." She stretches out a hand, imagines it turning into a paw. Her eyes are still closed, but she can feel it happening anyway. "Besides, it could've been worse. I could've gotten bitten by a were-frog." 

"A _were-frog?"_ Waverly snorts. It's such a wonderful sound that Nicole's heart aches. 

"Hey, you never know!" Nicole opens her eyes, knows she probably won't be able to talk out loud in a few seconds. "Even if I've always been more of a cat person, a wolf isn't the worst thing in the . . ." She trails off, slowly, knowing full well that she's not a human anymore. The scents hitting her nostrils like a freight train tell her that, too. Waverly smells like the crisp Canadian winter outside, and the bedroom smells like old wood and brick. It's familiar, calming, and Nicole begins to doze off again. 

***

Months pass, as they always do, and it's not so bad of an arrangement. The homestead's not too far from town, after all, and Nicole gets better at balancing her police duties with her werewolf status. 

(This doesn't stop her from panicking when Nedley drops a report about a very large coyote spotted around the woods on her desk) 

Wynonna comes around to the idea, in her own way, which mostly consists of flipping between being excited about one of her best friends being a badass werewolf and calling Waverly a furry. Nicole doesn't mind it. She doesn't mind any of it, really. 

"I love you," Waverly says late one night, when a light rain patters against the roof. To Nicole's ears, it sounds like thunder. She can't talk, not when she seems to have shifted in her sleep, but she supposes Waverly hears her loud and clear when she thinks it. 

_"I love you too."_

**Author's Note:**

> more miscellaneous headcanons from this au not featured in the fic: doc has no idea what a furry is, wolf nicole sometimes wears her stetson hat around the homestead and it's adorable, sometimes nicole's Canine Instincts kick in so the one (1) time wynonna brought a bunch of balloons home she hid behind a couch. while still human.


End file.
